


A Conversation in the White Hot Room

by Duck_Life



Category: Marvel Secret Wars Battleworlds, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Estrangement, F/M, Hot Chocolate, Talking To Dead People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 07:19:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5082796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the places to run into someone. Takes place immediately following Scott's, ah, "confrontation" with Doom in Secret Wars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Conversation in the White Hot Room

Scott notices the whiteness first.

He notices the whiteness first, and second the fact that it is _white_ , not red-tinted white, not pink, _white_. Immediately, his hands fly to his face, fingers searching, finding nothing but skin, no visor, no glasses, and habitual panic rises in his throat.

“You don’t need those here,” someone says, breaking the stagnant silence. Scott notices thirdly that he’s in a room, and fourthly that he’s not alone. The fifth thing he notices is Jean Grey. “Hey there, Slim.”

She wears a pale gold dress and sits propped up on a long white bed, the only furniture in the room, glancing up at him from a battered copy of _Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret_ as if he’s wandered in an interrupted her.

“What,” he tries to gasp out, but something stops him, he can still feel the ghosts of hands on his neck, the shadow of incredible pain. He stands opening and closing his mouth for a long moment, his own hands moving from his face to his neck, where there can’t _possibly_ be nothing there because he can’t _breathe_ , his neck must be _broken_.

Jean regards him. “Don’t worry, that’ll pass,” she assures him, watching as he struggles. What he’s doing, and what he’s doing _here_ , seems to hit her all at once. “Oh my god, did you die?” While he doesn’t answer, she seems to take his strangled silence as a yes. “Shit,” she says, and _laughs_. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s not funny,” she insists, laughing hysterically. Apologetic — but still coping with a fit of the giggles — Jean stands up off her bed and goes to him, the Judy Blume book forgotten. “Are you okay? I mean aside from being dead.”

Scott glances down at her, notes that she’s still trying not to laugh. She looks healthy, younger, red cheeks and red hair and bright blue eyes, pale freckles and laughter lines in her paler skin. It takes him a second to realize he is seeing her in full color. “I’m,” he says, but there’s not really any way to answer the question. He remembers being alive, and he remembers being here. Wherever “here” is.

Jean tries a different question. “So who offed you?”

Really, he thinks she’s being ridiculously blasé given the situation, but maybe this is just Jean’s world. Dying. Showing up again somewhere else even when you should be dead. “Doom,” he says, remembering the fire coursing through him and the glint in the other man’s eyes.

Jean snorts. “Look at us,” she sighs. “Getting our asses handed to us by Magneto and _Dr. Doom_.” She says it the way you might say “Count Chocula.”

“Yeah,” Scott says. What the hell else is he supposed to say? “So… where are we?”

“Well, it isn’t Heaven, if that’s what you’re wondering.” She also says “Heaven” the way you might say “Count Chocula.” “White Hot Room. I guess. It’s not really that hot. And I suppose all white rooms look alike.”

“Oh.” Again. What the hell else is he supposed to say? What do you say to your dead spouse after years apart, after being told over and over how disappointed she would be in you, after meeting the same fate she did and running into her? _Hi, honey, I’m home_.

Jean does the talking. “How long’s it been for you? Time passes differently here.”

“Since…” he says, trailing off. “Well, it’s been about ten years. Since you died.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.”

Scintillating conversation from two star-crossed lovers. “How long was it for you?”

She shrugs. “No idea. However long it takes me to read approximately two hundred books.”

“You get books in here?” he says, for some reason laboring under the assumption that she must have had _Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret_ on her when she died.

“Only books I’ve read before,” she says. “Things in my own memory. It’s dumb, but, you know.” She shrugs again. “Guess I should’ve thought about that before I went and got myself killed.”

He wants to say _I’m sorry_ but it catches in his throat. “So,” he says instead. “It’s just… this? All the time?”

“Yup,” she says. “Until now.” When Scott just shoots her a questioning look, she hitches up her dress and says, “Fire up those lasers, one-eye. We’re busting the hell out of here.”

Jean strides from the room into an equally white, equally featureless hallway, which surprises Scott. He’d thought the place infinite and identical, not somewhere with walls.

As if to prove the walls are there, Jean starts thumping her hands on them. “Haven’t you tried getting out before?” Scott asks her, suddenly wondering why she isn’t questioning him more. Does she know about everything that’s gone down? Has she read his mind? Does she just not care?

“Oh, of course I tried,” she says, focusing more on the walls than on him. “I was just _desperate_ to get back to my cheating husband, my lying teammates, and my ungrateful students.” She throws a look over her shoulder. It was a cheap shot, but she had to get it in. “Seriously, Scott, yes I tried.”

“And it never worked,” he surmises. “What makes you think it will work now?”

Jean Grey, who was his friend and then his girlfriend, his wife and then his dead wife, smiles. “Because now I have you.” As he follows her down the long hallway, she continues. “And,” she says, “because I’m Jean effin’ Grey. I’m fire and life infuckingcarnate. And I,” she adds, having found a weak spot. Each word she punctuates with a hard shove of her shoulder on the wall. “Am. Not. Missing. Star. Wars. Seven.”

Nothing happens, except that Jean looks tired. “Okay,” she says, “I think maybe that’s not the way to get out.”

“Do you just think that because your shoulder is tired?”

Her expression may as well be a middle finger. “Blast it.” They’re silent for a moment. “What are you waiting for?”

“What?” Scott says, startled. “Oh. _Oh._ I thought that was an exclamation. You know, like-” he mimics a British accent- “ _Blast it!_ ”

Jean glares at him. “Blast it, Cyclops, with your eye beams.”

“Right,” he says, and does. While he’s throwing everything he’s got at the blank wall, Jean adds in everything _she’s_ got. Telekinetically, she _pushes_.

They’re at it for a full minute before a tiny fissure appears in the wall. “This doesn’t really a make a lot of sense,” Scott says.

“Mouth shut, eyes open.”

The fissure becomes a crack, then many cracks, until the wall finally gives way and crumbles. Eyes wide, Jean drags him through the large hole they’ve created together. “Where are we now?” Scott says, glancing around. At first he thinks they’re just back in the White Hot Room, because all he sees is white. Then he realizes it’s too cold.

“Oh my God,” Jean says, looking around. The scene is somehow familiar to her before it’s familiar to Scott, probably only because he’s a little — a _lot_ — shaken.

It’s a tiny house in Alaska.

“We’re…” Scott breathes. “Are we… in Alaska?”

“Yep,” Jean says, sounding tired. “Except not really. I think this is… your little corner of Heaven. The Room must be adjacent.” A red-headed woman steps out of the front door of the house. “Ah,” Jean says, voice bitter. “Look. It’s Madelyne.”

As she gets closer, though, they realize that it isn’t Madelyne Pryor at all when the woman trips on a small pile of snow, gets annoyed, and psychically moves the rest of the snow out of her path to Scott. “Oh,” Jean says, very quietly.

“Hey you,” Heaven-Jean says, walking right up to Scott and kissing him before Scott has time to think about it. “You must be freezing out here. Come on inside, some cocoa would warm you up.” She winks at him. “Amongst other things.”

The first Jean pretends to gag. “Is this how you see me?”

“Not- not really,” Scott says, and it’s mostly true. Usually, when he pictures her she’s taller, and looking down on him, and angry. It’s neither a happy nor an accurate image, but sometimes that’s just the way it goes.

“I’ll be waiting,” Heaven-Jean says, sloughing back to the little house, oblivious to her double standing feet from her.

“I think we should stick around here,” Scott says as soon as she’s gone. Jean rolls her eyes.

“Oh, wonderful. Me and you and me again. I don’t know, Scott dearest, I think we had enough of that back in the real world. Especially now with sixteen-year-old me running around.” He shoots a sharp glance at her. “Yeah, okay, I read your mind when you showed up. Sue me.” Just when he’s about to retort, she turns around and points to a spot a few yards away where the snow appears to vanish over the edge of a cliff. “I don’t remember the Alaska house having a drop-off.”

The chasm doesn’t look like it ends, but Jean seems sure it does. “What if we just… die?” Scott says, pointing out what he sees as a troubling possibility.

“What, dying twice in one day?” Jean smirks. “Jesus. Welcome to my world.”

“I,” Scott starts, looking downward, but what the hell can he say? He’s scared. He was scared when he became the Phoenix. Frankly, he was scared when he opened his eyes and saw Jean here.

“I know,” she says, sounding warm for the very first time since he found her reading. She sounds like herself. “It’s okay, Scott. Do it with me. Bust out of this place.”

He wonders how much of it is her wanting him back in the land of the living and how much is her not wanting to do this alone. “Fine,” he agrees before he realizes he’s ready to. “Fine. Let’s jump.”

“On three,” Jean says, taking his hand. “One. Two.”

“Wait,” he says, gazing into the abyss and waiting to see a familiar pair of eyes staring back. “I need to… I just need to know. Jean. If you read my mind then you probably know I’ve made some… misguided decisions in recent past. And the thing is, people kept _asking me_ and _asking me_ ‘What would Jean think? If Jean were here, what would she think?’ And, well, I just need to know…” He looks at her. She’s beautiful. The wind whips her hair around until it looks like a flame. “What _do_ you think?”

She considers for a long moment. The other Jean, the fake Jean, must be finishing warming the milk by now, must be mixing in the chocolate. “I think,” Jean tells him, “that the Phoenix is wonderful and terrible. And I think maybe so are we.”

They jump.


End file.
